Tragedy

6. The 20th and 21st centuries

Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House, which has precursors in German ‘bourgeois tragedy’, is subtitled ‘A Modern Tragedy’. The play is modern in its middle-class, domestic, contemporary setting, its use of prose, and its more democratic political attitude, represented by its focus on the tribulations of women. Its heroine, Nora, embodies a Hegelian conflict of respect for authority and being true to one’s own feelings. That women could be tragic figures, whose conflicts and suffering manifest something important about the human condition, is an extraordinary advance in the history of the genre, even though Ibsen proposes no way of resolving conflict or avoiding suffering. Though written in the late nineteenth century, Ibsen’s play can be seen as inaugurating an expansion in the genre of tragedy that threatened to dissolve it altogether.

A major subject of debate in the twentieth century was whether it was a genre appropriate for the time, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) was often taken as a representative case. Miller himself argues that a ‘common man’such as Willy Loman can be a tragic hero: he sacrifices his own life for his ideals and for his family, even though he never recognizes that the ideals to which he has dedicated his entire life are not worthy of it. Like Oedipus, his effort to do what is right unwittingly leads to his own and his family’s destruction. Other playwrights such as Eugene O’ Neill (Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931) and film-makers such as John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) meld contemporary personal and political themes with ancient myths and classical tragic structures.

A. C. Bradley defends a fundamentally Hegelian analysis of tragedy in ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’ (1909). He agrees that conflict or struggle rather than suffering is the essence of tragedy, but argues that some conflicts depend on fate and not merely on the character of the agents, and that they may result from warring between good and evil and not, as Hegel proposes, merely between different goods.

Miguel de Unamuno (1913) holds that tragedy is a way of looking at life and he describes a ‘tragic vision’ or ‘tragic sense’ as a feature of novels and poetry as well as drama, and thus does not defend tragedy as a genre of drama that is relevant to modern times. In the same spirit, the eponymous fallacy in Joseph Wood Krutch’s impassioned ‘The Tragic Fallacy’ (1929) consists in attributing nobility to actions as an objective property of them. Tragedy, he claims, represents human actions as noble, satisfying the ‘universally human desire to find in the world some justice, some meaning, or, at the very least, some recognizable order’, whether or not it is there. He claims that Ibsen presents life as trivial and meaningless, and hence that his work lacks the tragic spirit that expresses life’s value rather than despair. Many have said the same of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, though Miller himself saw Willy Loman as heroic because he believes in something passionately enough that he is willing to die for it.

In the twentieth century, several forces emerged to question the viability and relevance of tragedy as a genre. General democratization, along with the breakdown of traditional class structure and gender roles, have eroded the sites of conflict – within families,between family and state or society – out of which tragedy has traditionally arisen. Marxist, Freudian, feminist and postmodern theories undermine the concept of a tragic hero as an agent who can exercise free choice, traditionally the source of tragic action. Bertolt Brecht, himself a Marxist, encourages a stylized form of presentation that alienates the audiences and hence discourages an empathic emotional response. Brecht does not affirm the power of reason, but sees individuals as alienated from the social forces that determine the course of history. Absurdists (Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Pinter) depict the world as meaningless and resist representing human actions, in Krutch’s words, as noble (Krutch1929). In general, the twentieth century was inhospitable to tragedy as a genre that positively affirms that there is value to human life, or that individuals can act rationally and freely in meaningful ways.

Nevertheless, other intellectual currents at work position human struggle and suffering as significant in ways that relate to traditional concerns of tragedy, that is, as connected to human agency, reason, emotion and moral action. One such current is cognitive theories of emotion, which take Aristotle as a precursor and are grounded in the cognitive sciences. On such accounts, emotions may be appropriate, rational responses to certain types of situations, and not merely blind, insatiable forces. Thus, whether the core of tragedy is seen to lie in a mistaken choice or a conflict of values, human emotions are not necessarily at odds with the exercise of reason or the potential for noble and admirable action. Debates over the nature of emotion have also spurred renewed interest in the paradox of tragedy. Another relevant intellectual current is the extension of the concept of the tragic to the real world, and not merely to types of art. This extension challenges the view of Unamuno and Krutch that nothing is genuinely tragic, but that actions and events can only be seen as such. For example, the events of September 11 2001, led Robert Solomon (2003) to reflect on the nature of ‘real horror’ and real heroism. In turn, such ideas are woven into how we conceive the genres of art, which are part of the history of how human beings attempt to give meaning to our lives in spite of, or perhaps because of, our weaknesses and vulnerabilities.